Overview

The Venetian master Tintoretto marshaled the unstable forces of nature to heighten
the drama of this scene from John's Gospel; the wind that fills the sail and bends
the mast also agitates the sea and sky, and the rocky waves meet the low clouds
that blow onto the land. Christ's outstretched arm draws Peter like a magnet, the
charge between them creating a dynamic link between the center of the picture and
the left foreground. Tintoretto has broken all forms into multiple planes, splintering
the light, and frosting the edges with a brush loaded with dry, lead-white oil paint.
This use of a thick, white impasto to accent the highlights and as a ghostly shorthand,
as in the grassy shore at Christ's feet, is a hallmark of Tintoretto's bravura
style.

Too wild and improvisatory to find a real following among his compatriots in Venice,
Tintoretto's bold expressions instead fired the imagination of one kindred temperament:
El Greco, who studied there before moving to Spain. So close in style and spirit
was El Greco's art that, earlier in this century, some experts believed that he,
and not Tintoretto, had painted the Christ at the Sea of Galilee.

Inscription

Marks and Labels

null

Provenance

Count Joseph Gallotti.[1] (Durlacher Brothers, New York).[2] Arthur Sachs [1880-1975], New York, by 1925;[3] sold March 1943 through (Jacques Seligmann & Co., New York) and (Moses & Singer, New York) to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[4] gift 1952 to NGA.

[1] This name appears on an undated prospectus for the painting in NGA curatorial files. The painting was not in the Gallotti sale at Hôtel Drouot, Paris, on 28 June 1905.

[2] There is no record of this painting in the extant Durlacher stockbooks at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

[4] The painting is recorded as being with the dealer Jacques Seligman in New York by Shapley 1973, 53, and in Germain Seligman, Merchants of Art: 1880-1960, Eighty Years of Professional Collecting, New York, 1961: pl. 87. According to Seligmann files, the firm did not own the picture but acted for Sachs in its sale. (Seligmann Papers, Archives of American Art, Series 2.1, Collectors Files, Box 204, folder 1, copy NGA curatorial files)
The bill of sale to the Kress Foundation for two paintings, dated 25 March 1943 and including Tintoretto's "Christ on Lake of Galilee," is on Moses & Singer letterhead and indicates that the sale is from "Mr. Arthur Sachs c/o Moses & Singer" (copy in NGA curatorial files).

Exhibition of Venetian Painting From the Fifteenth Century through the Eighteenth Century, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, June-July 1938, no. 66, repro., as Christ on the Sea at Galilee.

Shapley, Fern Rusk. Later Italian Painting in the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 1960 (Booklet Number Six in Ten Schools of Painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.): 32, color repro.

1960

The National Gallery of Art and Its Collections. Foreword by Perry B. Cott and notes by Otto Stelzer. National Gallery of Art, Washington (undated, 1960s): 25.